A drop of blood in a sea of piss

Possessive

Round where I live, we have a block of six houses and another set of houses behind it, all of which are served by the same access road.

It sounds a bit mad, but most of the time it’s fine.

Our block all use a set of communal bins, as no one house has the space for their own set of bins. Which is fine. I’m usually the one to put those bins out for collection, and someone else usually brings them in. The houses behind all have their own bins, and put them out individually, but they’re all in the same area for collection.

Over the last two weeks, there’s been a spare bin floating around. The communal bin area has its full complement, so it’s obviously one from one of the other houses – or it should be. However, the bin has a number on it, which isn’t the number relating to one of the houses.

So, weirdly, there’s been one house at the back that hasn’t had a recycling bin for the last two weeks – I assume because it wasn’t “theirs”, as it had a different house number on. This is particularly barking – as was the fact that they kept on then moving the bin into the (very tight) alleyway to the communal bins, and just leaving it there, like ‘out of sight, out of mind’. (Which is OK, except that alleyway is also our escape route in case of problems etc.)

All I can assume is that whoever brought the communal bins in (and they’re all just green plastic, remember) took in one from the houses behind, and left out one of ‘our’ bins as it wouldn’t fit. And then some fuckknuckle wouldn’t take in the ‘wrong’ bin, but didn’t want it cluttering up either, so kept on ‘hiding’ it in our alleyway.

I truly don’t get the whole thing of being possessive about one’s bins. They’re bins, for fuck’s sake. We’re not paying for the bins themselves, they’re not ‘owned’ (regardless of house numbers being painted on etc.) I certainly don’t get why you’d deprive yourself of a bin because of that reasoning…